All right, let's do a, where are we at? We have time, let's do a call. Let's do one more call and then we can call it quits for today. - Sounds good, we got a call from a monk. - Cal, I'm inspired by your work, thank you. My name is Etienne and I'm a Benedictine monk in the United States.

The idea of deep work and the deep life is really resonant with me. Part of my work is educating and forming young men to become leaders in the Catholic church. I wish to model and teach them deep work, slow productivity, the deep life, digital minimalism, et cetera. Do you have thoughts on how I might be a good mentor and teacher for these principles to these young men?

Again, thank you very much. - Well, it's a good question. I mean, certainly young men as a demographic are often in this day and age hungry for guidance. So it is a demographic group that is open to being inspired, open to being guided. And when they're not, when they're left adrift, negative things happen as a consequence.

I'm glad you're involved in being a guiding light to this particular group. I think one thing that's helpful, so I'm thinking about, I mean, I advise, when I get messages from a lot of people, but when I'm thinking about the advice I give to young men in particular, I think having the frame of the deep life is a helpful starting place.

So saying, okay, you're committing to this goal that you want to live a deep life. You don't wanna live a life that is haphazard. You don't wanna live a life that is arbitrary or at the whims of distraction or the noise of our culture, that you instead wanna live a life that is intentional and considered and remarkable in the sense that it makes people turn their head and catch their attention.

Oh, that's something, that's something. That is highly appealing to a lot of young men. And I think laying out that framework, okay, how do we do this? And making it clear that this is gonna require discipline and hard work, that is all fantastic. That is a charge we want.

Give me a challenge. I wanna have to rise to a challenge. So that is all good. The other part of the deep life framework that I think is for good men, good for young men is that it has these multiple elements to it. We often get stuck on just one aspect of good living.

We neglect the others. We get obsessed about career, but we fall behind on our philosophical or theological growth. We fall behind on leadership or community. Or we get really obsessed about theology. We're going through the process of becoming a monk and forget the importance of community or the importance of craft.

So this notion that we have various areas of life that all require service, I think that is very useful. And we know the areas I often talk about is craft. So what you actually do and create is community, being a leader and sacrificing non-trivial time and energy on behalf of other people.

Constitution, that is your health, that is your fitness. Contemplation, that's gonna be philosophy. That's gonna be theology, really making that important, making that important part of your life. And then I often do throw in celebration, the ability to build up taste and kind of stewardship and just gratitude for things that are good in the world and in your life and things you can go and just get pure enjoyment out of.

Breaking that down, here are five things. Each of these requires attention. Each of these requires cultivation. Is a message that young people and young men in particular really resonate with. And then you work through, let's do keystone habits in each and let's go through each of these one by one and we can spend six weeks in each and do a preliminary overhaul of that part of your life.

Let's overhaul your eating and get some real serious fitness going here, have some discipline there. How about your theological mind? How about your philosophical mind? You need to start reading books. You need to stop, you can get off that phone. You need to read, you need a half hour a day.

Here's what you're gonna read. We're gonna talk about it. You have to expand your mind. You have to open, okay, there we go. We're working on that as well. Leadership and community. What are you doing to make the life of people around you better? Are you spending time thinking about it every day?

Do you lead anything? Where are you leading other people towards somewhere better where you're sacrificing your own time and energy? These things are important and it's all different areas you're focusing on. When you focus on the craft piece, that's where deep work and concentration and focus and diligence and all of that comes into play, slow productivity.

So as you move through these different buckets, these different areas, all sorts of different learning can happen. But it's that overall pursuit. I want with discipline and intention to make my life into something deep and remarkable. That pursuit is like water to the explorer lost in the desert when we're talking about young men in today's culture.

So I think that's the way I would go about it and I would really challenge them in each of these areas. Don't just do the easy, do the hard. And I'll tell you, there are so many positive side effects of systematically trying to cultivate this life, especially if you're young and especially if you're adrift.

The excessive video game playing, the excessive phone scrolling, the pornography, the excessive drinking, all of these things that can afflict the 23 and adrift, they naturally just start to dissipate when you have these more important things that you're starting to work on, you're getting that feeling of success on them, you're getting that feeling of efficacy, you're getting that feeling of autonomy and meaning, and it transforms the whole way you think about the life.

It transforms the troll on the Twitter who's just angry and looking for attention into a leader in their town, into a real deep thinker who ends up contributing something really interesting to the world of ideas, to someone who is in good shape so they can be there for their family, for their community through thick and thin, into older age.

There's so many things good to come out of it. So I'm glad you're thinking about this. That's how I would do it. Challenge, discipline, intention, all aimed towards the deep life. Break into the categories, do my whole framework there. I think young men are hungry for it, and I think they will be quite receptive.

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